


Queen Of Ice

by Kissed_by_Circe



Series: Where Women Become Queens [3]
Category: The Tudors (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-14 09:49:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14767280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kissed_by_Circe/pseuds/Kissed_by_Circe
Summary: There will be no other man in her life. She raises Betty on her own – Peggy is a wonderful young woman, going to college, partying, not giving a damn about what people think of her, so she did something right when raising her – and she hopes that her younger daughter will take after her eldest. Her work satisfies her, her daughters are perfect, and she keeps writing and publishing her novels. She’s finally found her place in life.





	1. I

Karen Parr is a big girl, almost eleven, and she won’t embarrass herself in front of all these people. Her mother’s face is frozen, but her eyes are red, and so she wears a beautiful black veil, a picture of a young widow in mourning. They’re all dressed in black, her mother elegant as ever, with baby Hannah, wrapped in a piece of ebony-coloured velvet, on her arm, Liam in his dark suit next to her, and she holds onto the lilies she’s supposed to lay on her father’s coffin, because there’s nothing else she can do. 

There are no more tears left, not after she was told that there wouldn’t be a little brother, not after her father got sick. He was always there for her, and now he’s gone. She still can’t believe it, and sometimes she thinks he’ll come home any minute, sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the newspaper, like he used to, and she halfway expects him to be there. It’s the worst year of her life, and it’s not even August yet. 

• 

She’s sixteen when she makes her first big choice. And a difficult one, too. She’s been accepted into all colleges she applied to – it had only been four, and she wasn’t even sure which one she’d like to go to the most – so now she’s sitting there with the letters and no idea what to do. Can’t she just throw a coin? Let fate decide? She’s not sure. 

She doesn’t even know what she wants in life, study literature and become a professor, or marry and settle down with some children, or just run away from all responsibilities, become a ghost and never come back? The possibilities are endless, and she’s scared. She’s only a teen, and she’s scared to death. She can’t leave, she knows, she has to take care of her mother and younger siblings. 

Liam’s two years younger, Hannah ten, and her mother is unbelievably strict when it comes to her children. She can’t leave them behind. Her mother is happy, because she only applied to Ivy League colleges, and she’s relieved, because they offered her an internship for Princeton – they aren’t short on money, but her siblings need to go to college too, and it’s expensive, no matter what – and she is happy too, because of her mother’s happiness. In the end, she chooses Princeton, not because of her mother, but because it’s the right thing to do. 

• 

Her glasses are fake, her blouses too stiff, her skirts long enough to touch the floor. The Karen going to college only wears formal clothes in muted colours, sits upright like a lady, never goes to parties. She studies hard, falls asleep at the library over textbooks, only becomes friends with older people, the kind of students she can look up to. Her mother is proud of her big girl, always to grown-up, and she wants to please her so much that she forgets what she wants in life. She’s content, most of the time, with her quiet little life, but when she sees beautiful, confident girls giggling and laughing, she feels like she’s the plainest woman on earth, too mature, too serious, almost transparent. 

For a short time, she dates a guy named Woody, not because he’s handsome or charming – which he isn’t, he’s a plain as she is – but because his grandfather reminds her of her own father, and their arguments bring some action into the dullness of her life. When Woody’s grandfather dies, she attends his funeral, but she doesn’t shed a tear outside her bathroom – no one will see her panda eyes, because she’s too old, too grown-up to cry like a baby.


	2. II

Her first wedding dress is like a mask. She hides behind the high collar and the long tight sleeves, likes how it’s cut like a dress from the roaring twenties with its waistline hanging low on her narrow hips and the hem that touches the floor, leaving a trail of dancing dust in her wake. Her pale braid is pinned to the top of her head, the pins scratching her skin and biting into her head, and she feels like a princess, the way every girl wants to feel on her wedding day. 

They drink champagne, and she giggles at bit, feeling younger than her twenty-two years. There are lilies in her bouquet, and she wants to rip them out, but she doesn’t, because she’s a woman grown, and she’ll be a wife and stepmother before the day ends. Liam talks to her, offers to be her get-away-driver, if she changes her mind, and when she thinks of Neville Latimer, her fiancée, and how solemn he looked on his 40th birthday, when he proposed to her, the dread of an ordinary lifestyle fills her heart, and she wants nothing more than to grab Liam’s hand and run away. 

She doesn’t, because Peggy, who’s going to be her stepdaughter, who reminds her of Hannah, who needs her, walks up to her to play with the little pearls on her belt, and so she picks her up and walks down the aisle, straight forward and without regret. 

• 

The hair dye was a mistake, everyone says, a girl with her complexion shouldn’t dye her hair that dark. They are right, she thinks, looking paler than ever with her hair, once platin blonde, now blueish black, and the purple circles under her light grey eyes. It clearly was a mistake, but she doesn’t want to look like herself anymore, always the good, obedient daughter, wife and nurse. She hates it. 

Her life was perfect, people say, with a family of her own, a spacious house in the suburbs, the nanny that allowed her to pursue a career even after the wedding. It’s a shame that she hasn’t any children of her own, her mother says, but she couldn’t conceive one during the first years of her marriage, and when Neville became sick, she abandoned her hopes of having a child of her own and became his nurse instead. When he takes his last breath, whispering the name of his first wife, she’s not mad. He never really loved her, she knows, he only needed a mother for Peggy after his first wife died. 

She promises to take care of her, says her last goodbye and grabs cheap dye on the way home. She looks like a teenager for two days, her siblings don’t even recognise her when she picks up her daughter after work, and she feels younger than ever. Her stylist scolds her, as does her mother, and when she stands at Neville’s casket four days later, her hair is in an elegant platin-coloured bun again. 

•

She becomes more confident. Free of her mother’s pressure and her husband’s needs, she throws herself into work, becomes a literature professor, even publishes some textbooks of her own. Her relationship with Peggy is wonderful. Being the adopted mother to a girl that was orphaned when she was less than half a year old isn’t easy, with all the questions she can’t and won’t answer yet, but she loves her with all her heart. 

Sometimes, when Peggy does something, like wrinkle her nose or laugh or pick at her food, she catches herself thinking about how similar she is to her, how her daughter looks like Hannah or how she laughs like Liam, before she remembers that this talented little girl isn’t related to her by blood. 

It feels like her life begins at 27. Parties and, after a proper time of mourning, some dates, become a part of her life, as normal to her as grading essays and driving her girl form football practice to tutoring lessons. She makes friends she really likes, people her own age who never worry about babysitters and homework, and she’s seen in clubs and fast-food restaurants almost as often as at fancy dinner parties and vernissages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Neville Latimer = John Neville (*1493) 
> 
> Peggy Latimer = Margaret Neville (*1525)


	3. III

She meets Tom at one of these parties, when she goes outside to escape the noise and finds a handsome stranger on the terrace. The air is filled with the scent of a thousand blossoms and the muted piano music coming through the French doors in her back, and when she leans on the cold marble of the balustrade, she looks down on a sea of cherry trees in full bloom. His eyes are glued to her long, pale hair, shimmering like ivory in the soft light of the moon, and she knows she must look both ethereal and beautiful to him. 

His voice is low and inviting, his hand on her back hot compared to the chilly April night, and his mouth tastes of cherries and brandy and cigarettes. He leaves with scarlet lip stick stains on his jaw and a smirk, and she wraps herself in her shawl to hide the love bites he left on her collarbone. Later that night, after she drove home the babysitter, she touches her lips where his kisses still linger, and smiles at the crumpled slip of paper with his phone number before she puts it in her journal. 

• 

They meet again, and often. She never stays the night, and he never comes to her place – he’s not the kind of man she wants to introduce to Peggy, after all – but somehow, she stills falls for him. Tom is like cookie dough, sweet and tempting, and she doesn’t want to stop tasting him, even when she knows it’s bad for her figure. 

He’s a ghost, his touches lingering on her skin hours after he’s gone, his smell clinging to her hair like a promise, his late-night calls after Peggy’s bedtime with his husky voice barely understandable. She wants him, all of him, but she can never have it. He’s a lone wolf, bound to no one, and he’ll never settle down for her, he’ll never be a family man, and she wants a family. And that’s why she starts dating Hal. 

• 

They meet at the party of a friend of hers, with him criticising one of her favourite novels, and by the end of the night he’s clued to her lips, watching her every move, looking at her like she’s a unicorn or some sort of supernatural being come to life. He doesn’t only want her, but her life too, complete with stepdaughter and house in the suburbs, and at first, she’s unsure, but when she walks in on Tom and a stripper, in Hal’s office, after he asked her to come there, she cries into his shirt, not caring about her appearance, because, in that moment, nothing matters but the strong arms holding her.  
• 

Hal’s sleeping at her place that night, makes her breakfast the next morning, drives Peggy to school, because they had some ice-cream and some vodka late at night, and she’s not sober yet, and they fall into some sort of routine. Peggy likes him, and that’s the most important for Karen. Eight months later, he moves in with them, and Karen is content with her life, if not happy, even if she has the feeling that something’s missing, and she’ll enjoy it while it lasts. 

• 

It lasts almost four years, while Hal comes closer to his goal of becoming President, while Peggy turns into a brooding teenager, while Karen dreads the day when Hal will propose to her – she always told him that she doesn’t want to marry again, that she’s not ready for such commitment, everything that she could tell him. He doesn’t know that she doesn’t want to grow old with him, spend the rest of her life with him, that she doesn’t want the life he wants. He wants a first lady and five children, and she wants to be her own person. In secret she prays that he’ll never become president and force her to decide between him and her independence. They float through their daily routine without moving – until Tom comes back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tom Seymour = Thomas Seymour (*1508)


	4. IV

He stayed away after what she calls ‘the incident’ – it’s shorter than ‘the day when she saw him kissing a semi-nude woman in his apartment’ – but he returns after some years, older, paler, worn out from too much alcohol, too many parties, with wrinkles and some grey strands in his golden hair, and he’s still the most attractive, the most charming man she’s ever met, but now he wants marriage and commitment and children, and so he proposes to her. It’s the same and oh so different at the same time, and she loses her mind. She breaks up with Hal, who, as always, understands, and Tom moves in with her and Peggy, and they are happy and in love – and reckless. 

• 

They elope after only eight days – Karen and Peggy are shopping, and she tries on a short A-line dress with a petticoat of polka dotted tulle, and Peggy asks her why they don’t just drive to Vegas and get married there. She knows for sure that she only said that to get her out of the house over the weekend, Peggy is sixteen, after all, and probably wants to throw a party with her stepmother out of town, but she likes the idea, and the next morning Karen Latimer becomes Karen Seymour in a chapel in Vegas, surrounded by sparkling confetti and laughter and under the hot desert sun, with silk flowers in her hair, red dust twirling around them, the tulle of her pink and puffy dress itching on her legs. 

•

When they come back from their honeymoon some days later, Peggy opens the door with a smug look on her face and the last remains of a wild house party hidden in her room – Karen finds them later, some plastic cups and a broken lamp, and says nothing – and welcomes Tom into their life like he’s always been there. 

To everyone’s surprise – and Peggy’s delight – she becomes pregnant only weeks after their elopement, after thinking herself sterile for decades, and she’s scared, because she never cared for an infant before, but as soon as she holds her new-born daughter in her arms for the first time, after hours of labour and losing too much blood, she’s sure she can handle this. They call her Betty, and Karen has never been happier. Everything is perfect – that is, until Tess moves in. 

• 

The daughter of one of her closest friends is thirteen, and Karen offers to take her in while her mother is working abroad. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, Tess has been staying with them for some weeks during the summer holidays for years, but now there are Tom and the baby, too. 

At first, all seems fine, given that she’s busy looking after Betty and can’t watch over the teen all the time, but when Peggy has a heated argument with Tom about his behaviour towards the younger girl, she starts to notice the way he looks at her, the way he touches her, too. When she walks in on him trying to kiss Tess, she is calm and collected, a statue of ice, at the police station, while Tess gives her testimony, in court, when his sentence is passed and her divorce granted, in public, when someone asks after her dear Tom. 

• 

The day she burns his clothes and books and everything he left in her apartment, she cries, and screams, and ruins her mascara. When Peggy finds her in the backyard of the house she bought with Tom, drowning in tears and wine and flakes of ash, she wipes the smudges of her face, and smiles. 

• 

There will be no other man in her life. She raises Betty on her own – Peggy is a wonderful young woman, going to college, partying, not giving a damn about what people think of her, so she did something right when raising her – and she hopes that her younger daughter will take after her eldest. Her work satisfies her, her daughters are perfect, and she keeps writing and publishing her novels. She’s finally found her place in life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betty Seymour = Mary Seymour (*1548) 
> 
> Tess Boleyn; Anais’ Daughter = Elizabeth Tudor (*1533)

**Author's Note:**

> Karen Parr = Katherine Parr (*1512) 
> 
> Karen’s Mother = Maud Green (*1492) 
> 
> Hannah Parr = Anne Parr (*1515) 
> 
> Liam Parr = William Parr (*1513) 
> 
> Woody = Edward Burgh (*1508) 
> 
> Woody’s Grandfather = Edward Burgh (*1463)


End file.
